Where Does the Internet Actually Live?

An internet outage, caused by a hungry squirrel, inspired journalist Andrew Blum to write Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. In the book he explores the physical reality of the Internet—its sights, sounds, and smells. We tagged along as Blum recently took a small group on a walking tour of New York City's Internet, which uses many hubs that date back to the early days of the telephone industry.

Fiber Highways

Fiber Highways

The Internet lives under this manhole cover on the corner of Murray and Church Streets in lower Manhattan.

The information we send over the Internet follows a distinct physical pathway—it doesn't just evaporate when you hit send and then suddenly reconstitute itself at its destination. The data, translated into pulses of light, travels through twisted strands of fiber. In Manhattan, the Empire City Subway (abbreviated as ECS on the manhole cover) provides the pathways for that data. ECS maintains a network of underground conduits filled with cables for television, landlines, traffic signals, and the Internet.

As our tour group is dripping sweat onto the sidewalk (thanks, July heat wave), Blum recalls one winter evening when he watched workers thread a cable through the conduit. Beneath an ECS manhole cover, "there was no visible bottom, only an abyss of twisted cables," he writes in Tubes. It's so crowded down there that the workers joke that the cables pop out like snakes from a can when they take the cover off; they have to grease new cables in order to squeeze them through the conduits. "It's been a problem for 80 years," Blum says.

The Fortress

The Fortress

A short walk from our manhole cover stands the AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street, one of several such windowless monoliths in the city. "I have no idea what's inside this building," Blum says as we all crane our necks upward to behold the compound. The building is seemingly impenetrable to journalists, including Blum, who spent two weeks trying to get inside. He thinks it must contain the remnants of old-style, top-down telecommunications. "Whatever is in here, it is not the Internet," he says. "On the Internet, you are nothing unless you connect to another network."